Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline Read Online Free Page A

events have been catastrophic for my business,’ the café’s owner tells me via a translator on the phone. ‘It’s suffered a huge slide. I cannot talk to you about what happened. I want us to stay out of the news now.’
    Internet cafés are more widespread in Taiwan than in the West. For young players, it’s more economical to play games at one of these establishments than at home. Two dollars buys eight hours of game time. Take into account the cost of a broadband connection, a PC, electricity, and the games themselves, and an Internet café is the most affordable location in which to play an online game.
    Big City is one of the larger café franchises in Taiwan. I call a branch in the Yongkang district of Tainan, fifteen miles from the café where Feng died.
    ‘Yeah, since the news of that death, business has been different,’ says Lian, the twenty-five-year-old staff member who answers the phone. ‘It’s far quieter than usual. It seems probable to me that this downturn is somehow linked.’
    ‘Are you worried that the same thing that happened in Yujing might happen in your café?’ I ask.
    ‘Of course,’ she says.
    ‘Have you taken any measures to prevent a similar tragedy?’
    ‘Headquarters held a meeting after Feng’s death,’ Lian says.‘After that, employees were issued with new guidelines, asking us to pay closer attention to customers. We have been told to issue a verbal warning if we notice any customer sitting at the same terminal for too long. To be honest, though, I haven’t noticed anyone behaving in the same manner as Feng did.’
    A little farther north, twenty-seven-year-old Huang, branch manager of the Ingame Café, is more willing to admit that people playing games for prolonged periods of time is an issue.
    ‘Our business has been mostly unaffected by the recent death,’ she says. ‘We do have customers like that, who stay here for a very long time. Not many, but certainly a few. But I’m not really worried that something like that might ever happen here. We have a system to prevent customers from sitting in front of the computer for too long.’
    ‘How long is too long?’ I ask.
    ‘We don’t allow any customers to play for more than three days at a time. Once it gets past that amount of time, we ask the customer to go home, rest, and refresh. This is a well-organised Internet café, you see.’
    She pauses for a moment. ‘You know what? Don’t even mention three days. In fact, I just asked a customer to leave who had been here for over twenty-four hours.’
    ‘Why?’ I say. ‘Was there a problem?’
    ‘Other customers had started to complain about his smell. So I asked him to leave. In my experience, no one tends to play a game for longer than a day and a half at a time.’
    When it comes to apportioning blame for the deaths of Rong-Yu, Feng, and all the others, Miss Huang is unequivocal.
    ‘The problem with this sort of addiction stems from those addictsthemselves,’ she says. ‘It’s probably their family or their education that’s to blame. It’s really a matter of self-discipline.’
    Since the 1970s, doctors have believed that it’s possible for a video game to trigger a heart attack in a person with a weak heart. In 1977, the cardiologist Robert S. Eliot used Pong to replicate stressful situations for his cardiac patients at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He studied more than one thousand patients, monitoring the game’s effect on their heart rate and blood pressure.
    ‘We have had heart-rate increases of sixty beats per minute and blood pressures as high as 220 within one minute of starting a computer game,’ he said at the time. ‘It happens quite a lot, but the patients have no awareness.’
    In fact, Peter Burkowski’s autopsy in 1982 found that the young man had scar tissue on his heart that was at least two weeks old. The coroner recorded that the stress of the arcade games Burkowski had been playing triggered the attack in his